This is a creature design I did over the past couple of days for the "Creature of the Week" contest on Conceptart.org, the brief was simply Annihilators from Nessus, the ninth circle of hell. Demons are pretty easy to throw together, so I took the opportunity to have a go at digital painting and see if I could explore the process, more than the concept. To begin with I went through ideas very quickly, then once I had a sketch of something that a good design, and sat well in space, I moved onto to painting in a simple top down light source, and in doing so added all the details ()this was the part that took the longest). I then got some images of marble, rust and ink in water, and used them with blend layers to add some textures and "grittyness" to the design. I finished by using dodge and burn to bring back some of the highlights and dark shades that were lost in the texturing.

Overall I am quite pleased with the result, while conceptually weak I think it provided a good opportunity to practice "rendering" and get stuck in pushing digital paint around. Also it was a good experience working to the deadline of the competition, it is all too easy to get complacent with work and let things drag out much longer than they need to.

The Brave Little Tailor, Original Text

For my project I have decided to work with the brothers Grimm tale “The Brave Little Tailor”. In a nutshell it is about a naïve, bravado tailor who goes out into the world to seek his fortune; however when he finds himself in sticky situations his naivety comes across as shrewdness and his bravado courageous. He owes his success as much to good luck as to his quick tongue. The first half of the tale we see the tailor overcome physical adversity such as out witting giants, and in secound half over come social adversity by overcoming class boundaries and eventually becoming king.

The tale is morally ambiguous; on the one hand it could be pointing out the usefulness of being witty and agile, on the other it could be saying that to be successful in this world one must resort to cheating and trickery. The Brave Little tailor is as much a comment on the world as a moral guideline.

Above is the 1938 animated short by Disney of the brave little tailor, sadly in this moralistic version the ambiguity is replaced by definite guidelines. The morally vague tailor is replaced by the typical good guy (Mickey mouse) who unwittingly finds himself in a perilous confrontation with a giant. Any commentary on classist society restraining the protagonist is done away with in favour of the conventional love story between Mickey and Minnie.

What is interesting when comparing the Grimm adaptation with the Disney is that they both use this folk tale as a vehicle for the different moral objectives of their time. However I would like to point out a key difference, the brothers Grimm collected the story from the people of the time, granted editing of the diverse range of folk tales did take place, but the moral objective was decided by the people who told and retold the story over generations. The Disney version however was produced by Walt Disney himself, the moral objective was decided by him and a handful of his peers. In a sense we have top down versus bottom up, something which after all these years is becoming relevant again. So a possible direction for my own project might be what moral objectives would a modern, internet driven bottom up culture push through this old story? What medium(s) would it be in? Would it be told in one way or many ways? Hopefully I will be able to answer these questions and incorporate these elements into my own take on the narrative, art style and presentation.

Lighting Tutorial

Above is the results after a lighting tuturial I had. The tutorial covered realistic lighting and shadows in Maya, through the tutorial I learned about:

-Types of lights in Maya
-Photons in Maya
-Global Illumination
-Final Gather
-Mental Ray

After setting up the scene (Box with a hole in top and a ball in the corner) we first began looking at the various types of lights in Maya.

-Spot Light, projects a cone of light from a point.
-Directional Light, projects a plane of light, only rotation affects this light source.
-Point Light, projects from a point all around it
-Ambient Light, similar to point but will always project everywhere aswell

After playing around with the types of light, we found that quadratic decay provided the most realistic results. Under the mental ray/global illumination options on the light is the option to turn on photons, these are almost like balls projected from the light and bounce around picking up surface colours. By playing with the extremes of the intensity and exponent we gained a better understanding of how these work.

What I found out about lighting was, while technical, it also required a lot of playing around and seeing what worked best, constantly changing lighting and render settings to find out how they effect the results.

Texturing Tutorial

3 Types of Texturing

-UV controlled, normal 2d maps

-Projection mapping in 2d space, uses a 3D node

-3D textures

The above images are part of a 3D texture tutorial, and show how useful it can be as it doesnt rely on on a set of UV maps.

To create 3D textures
Hypershade - Create - 3D textures - Select Texture e.g. snow, volume noise.

These textures can be linked up in the hypershade to an objects default texture (e.g. lambert), example connections would be colour and bump.

Once connected these 3D textures can be manipulated in the atribute editor, in the tutorial we used snow as the icing with a volume noise plugged into the threshold, then duplicated it into the bump depth input. By playing around with the atributes we were able to manipulate the 3D textures into looking like a doughnut.

Lotte Reiniger

This is some work by Lotte Reiniger which I have been looking at for my project. What I found interesting about her work is the high amount of characterization present in the seemingly simple silhouettes. This reminds me of the skillful Huntsman (my initial source of inspiration) where they begin their character designs with silhouettes as a means to both establish a strong design but also to burn through the more obvious design choices. Importantly it provides the artist with a way of engaging critically with the design process without getting absorbed into fine detail. While Lotte's work is a good example animation, the strength of the silhouettes is what I really like.

House Project Continued

These images show my progress in mudbox, the texture didnt take that long to slap on with images I got from CG Texures. Adding the windows and door on the other hand was a bit more tricky as I used photographs which had to be cleaned up first in photoshop.

The colour is proving to be a bit of a pain to paint on, as the house will have very clear boundries for colour where different materials meet, but there is no easy way of doing this, just to paint very carefully. For the wooden shambles I painted on a dark brown to begin with then over the top on a seperate layer dry brushed on a lighter brown to bring out the texture more.

Arthur Rackham

This is work by Arthur Rackham, I think this is the sort of direction im going to go when it comes to 2D aspect of my project. The illustrations have a timeless but gritty feel to them. I like the way he uses composistion to depict these very dreamlike images, it feels almost like the tales are being remembered years later.

The Skillful Huntsman

The main inspiration for my project this year came from The Skillful Huntsman. A book created by a tutor and 3 of his students at the art center college of design. The aim of the book was to visualize the brothers grimm fairytale "The Skillful Huntsman" for use in the entertainment industry. The aim of the book was exploring various concepts for the characters and environments, and while the quality of the work is to a very high standard, I felt the over all tone was fairly bland and the ideas were not different enough. For example even though 3 artists produced work for the book, it is very difficult to tell the work apart. This synching of styles would be good in perhaps an actual project where the artists have to work in tandum, but for a book concerned with concepting I think it falls short on ideas. Nonetheless theres is some outstounding work in this book.

Hard Body Sculpting Project

This project's aim is to explore the ways in which a hard body model can be sculpted and mapped. To begin with I used an older, low poly model (below) but quickly found out in Mudbox that the differing sizes of polygons at higher subdivision levels were altering the quality of sculpted detail massively.
(below bottom). So I began modeling a new house with the aim of keeping the poly's the same size and also keeping them all quads (which is better for sub dividing).

Below is the initial concept work I made last year, and I used it as a rough guide for my model.

Starting with cubes I blocked out the basic shape of the building and then began subdividing and attatching the pieces together. It is important to note that when sub dividing hard body models you must crease all the edges first, otherwise the model will round at the corners and the form will be lost. once I has happy that I had enough (evenly sized) poly's I began to add the details such as the shambles and balcony's. While I could of added this detail in Mudbox, I felt that i could get more definition if it was included on the base mesh, and I wouldn't have to worry about stretching poly's.

Nixon Troll

The first small research project I completed was a simple troll head. Starting with a couple of orthos I doodled over summer I set out to model a low poly mesh, sculpt and paint it up in zbrush then export the maps out and stick them on the original low poly mesh in maya.
Above the Orthographics I worked from, and below the initial low poly mesh (Left) with a subdivided counterpart (right).At this stage I made my UV map (on the low poly mesh) by creating a seam from the back of his neck upto the top of his head, and also removed the horns to reduce deformation. Once the UV is made you cannot go back and begin editing the mesh, moving vertices is ok but I found out the hard way that if you begin merging or creating verts then the UV map will need to be created again, along with any other completed texture maps.

Next I fired up Zbrush and began to sculpt in the details, initially I found the navigation in Zbrush to be a little tricky as it focuses on moving the object rather than the camera however I soon got used to it and really enjoyed sculpting in the texture. The results can be seen below.Once the sculpting was completed I changed the material to a standard grey one and began poly painting, which I could then export as my difuse map (colour). Below is a quick video of the finished sculpt, ready for map exports.

One issue I had when exporting my maps from Zbrush was with the normal map. At first I generated the map from object space (below top) which took into account the direction of normals in a set 3D environment, so once it was applied to my low poly mesh I started getting very strange shadows comming from the normal as it had transfered information about the whole object. What I needed was a normal map generated from the tangents of the poly(below bottom). This way it would be effected by whatever environment I put it in. The Last two maps, Displacement and Diffuse, were quite straightforward in comparrision, only thing to note is that in Zbrush you need to generated a displacement map before you can get your normal map.
As the whole project was based around getting the most from low poly meshes I used the displacement map as a specular map. The end result you can see below, I found mental ray was far better at producing results with the normal map. I also applied the same textures to the higher subdivided model as comparison.